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Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Coming Soon--The Black Activist Zine
COMING SOON!
THE BLACK ACTIVIST ZINE
READ, DOWNLOAD & SHARE AT
WWW.JBLUN.ORG
READ AND SHARE AT
WWW.BLACKACTIVISTZINE.ORG
READ, DOWNLOAD AND SHARE CURRENT ISSUE
THE BLACK ACTIVIST:
THE BLACK ACTIVIST ZINE
READ, DOWNLOAD & SHARE AT
WWW.JBLUN.ORG
READ AND SHARE AT
WWW.BLACKACTIVISTZINE.ORG
READ, DOWNLOAD AND SHARE CURRENT ISSUE
THE BLACK ACTIVIST:
A Struggle & Analysis Journal for Black Liberation initiated by the Black Left Unity Network
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s. e. anderson
author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners
www.blackeducator.org
www.blackeducator.blogspot.com
If WORK was good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor. (Haiti)
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Available now, DVD Hip Hop: The New World Order
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AVAILABLE FOR RENT/OWN! GET IT NOW!
Rent (DIGITAL STREAM) ($4.99) or Own (DVD or Digital Download) ($19.99) Get it here: http://muvi.es/w4115 ... The archival global hip hop documentary is now available online! Be one of the first to see this groundbreaking film which explores the global impact of hip hop music and culture highlighting 8 international cities: Tokyo, Havana, London, Paris, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Rio de Janeiro, & Johannesburg. Featuring interviews with international pioneers/all-stars: Oxmo Puccino Roots Manuva Method Man Zeebra MURO(DJ/PRODUCER) Questlove MC Jean Gab'1 Officiel Blak Twang Marcelo D2 MC MARECHAL Dead Prez + More! Directed by Muhammida El Muhajir Share this movie and make money! http://muvi.es/w4115 Share this movie and earn cash rewards. When you promote this movie on your website or blog, you will earn 10.0% of any sales that come through your referrals. To begin earning money from sharing, watch the trailer and enter your email address to create your affiliate codes. Follow us on Twitter @hiphopisglobal WATCH THE FILM! SPREAD THE WORD! SHARE THE TRAILER! |
Tuesday, October 8, 2013
Amiri Baraka replies to Marvin X poem
I'm only 79, dude. You might be older.--AB
How could I forget AB is ten years older than I am? I must be getting old!--MX
Hapi b day AB @ 80
true trooper
original rapper
from the Black Ark, New Ark
godfather of North American African juju
majic words raise the dead deaf blind
cast spells on all devils known and unknown
seen and hidden
especially in the darkness of our lives
down here on the ground Babylon
keep working those majc spells old man
youth will listen when they can
Ras will rap to them now
Da Mayor in da house
wit Middy, Ahi, Obalaji got his back
relax AB, take Amina out for dinner
some place on the moon
far away from the pain of yesterday
there is joy for us all in the now
will you and Amina dance tonight
we love you madly!
--Marvin X
10/7/13
How could I forget AB is ten years older than I am? I must be getting old!--MX
Hapi b day AB @ 80
true trooper
original rapper
from the Black Ark, New Ark
godfather of North American African juju
majic words raise the dead deaf blind
cast spells on all devils known and unknown
seen and hidden
especially in the darkness of our livesdown here on the ground Babylon
keep working those majc spells old man
youth will listen when they can
Ras will rap to them now
Da Mayor in da house
wit Middy, Ahi, Obalaji got his back
relax AB, take Amina out for dinner
some place on the moon
far away from the pain of yesterday
there is joy for us all in the now
will you and Amina dance tonight
we love you madly!
--Marvin X
10/7/13
Monday, October 7, 2013
Hapi B day, AB @ 80
Hapi b day AB @ 80
true trooper
original rapper
from the Black Ark, New Ark
godfather of North American African juju
majic words raise the dead deaf blind
cast spells on all devils known and unknown
seen and hidden
especially in the darkness of our livesdown here on the ground Babylon
keep working those majc spells old man
youth will listen when they can
Ras will rap to them now
Da Mayor in da house
wit Middy, Ahi, Obalaji got his back
relax AB, take Amina out for dinner
some place on the moon
far away from the pain of yesterday
there is joy for us all in the now
will you and Amina dance tonight
we love you madly!
--Marvin X
10/7/13
Dr. Nathan Hare's Foreword to How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy
Note: The Original name of Dr. M's Pan African Mental Health Peer Group was Black Reconstruction, suggested by Dr. Nathan Hare. Also, Dr. Hare gave us the term White Supremacy Type II to explain our pathology. "They" suffer Type I.
How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy
Fitness for duty is a pleasant but likely side effect of Dr. M’s “Black Reconstruction Groups” working to free the minds of persons addicted to white supremacy. This no doubt is no doubt why they do not limit themselves in their group sessions to expressions of resentment of racist mistreatment and dissatisfaction but also calmly allow its hidden effects, which often remain unconscious in the way in which the relentless karate chops of white supremacy have killed our dreams on a daily basis and shattered our ability to love, to feel loved, to love ourselves and therefore one another. I listened with much satisfaction as Dr. M and his assemblies delved into the depths of fractured feelings and emotions of the brokenhearted in order to help them come to terms with betrayal, jealousy and rage, in their moving endeavors to learn to love again.
How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy
By Dr. Nathan Hare
Call him Dr. M, as I do, though I’ve known him by other names in other places and, like Diogenes, who went around holding up a lantern to the faces of the people he would meet in the streets of ancient Athens looking for an honest man, I have come to the realization that we as a people have been waiting and looking for somebody like Dr. M to come along for more than half a century, ever since America was stunned by The Mark of Oppression (the Jim Crow era book by two white liberal psychiatrists whose findings had brought them to the heartfelt conclusion that the race of people called “Negroes” was “crushed.”
In only four years after their epitaph was written, Negroes (now called “blacks,” “Blacks,” “Afro-Americans,” “African-Americans,” or as Dr. M sometimes calls them “American Africans”) had exploded in Montgomery with passive resistance. In four more years the “sit-in movement” broke out among the youth, followed like a one-two punch by the so-called “freedom riders” (roving bands of individuals who boarded and defied the segregation of interstate vehicles and included a future student of mine on spring break from Howard University by the name of Stokely Carmichael). Then came “Black Power,” in the context of which I first heard of a man who had metamorphosed from the slave-name Marvin Jackmon into a prominent “North American African poet” who went by the name of Marvin X (the X connoting “the unknown”).
While, despite the fact that I have known him through the intervening years, I cannot unravel every single quality of the brother, I can testify that Dr. M is a brand new Marvin, a Dr. Marvin, a social doctor, if you will, with a gift and a mission for a new black movement. I know this to be true because, aside from my Ph.D. and years of experience in the practice of clinical psychology, I specialized in the study of social movements for a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago. But more than that, I have watched a dedicated Dr. M, up close and clinically, going about his fearless work in the mean streets of San Francisco. Over a period of many months, on many a dark and dreary sometimes rainy Wednesday night, I served as a consultant in clinical psychology to Dr. M’s “Black Reconstruction Group” (the pilot to his twelve-step model now unveiled in this important book on “How to Recover from Addiction to White Supremacy.” In the Recovery Theatre’s pilot groups, I sat with diverse and ad hoc coteries of men and women gathered impromptu in the austere basement of a Catholic church, St. Boniface, located in the heart of The Tenderloin, the highest crime district in San Francisco, just down a few blocks from the famous Glide Memorial Methodist Church.
Pictured below: Dr. M, Muhammida El Muhajir, Dr. Julia Hare, Nisa Ra, Dr. Nathan Hare
Many a night I marveled at the ease with which Dr. M and his talented co-facilitator, Suzette Celeste brought out trickles of lost and unleashed hope and inspiration in the minds of destitute and degraded street people as well as in the confused and empty psyches of invited members of the black bourgeoisie who, still trying to be unbroken, had come where not many “bourgies” would dare to tread.
On many an appointed night I stood by silently looking on while Dr. M and his collaborators sauntered out into the shadowy mysteries of dilapidated streets to solicit and harness hapless homeless men and a woman or two and bring them in to meet as equals with the anxious representatives of the black bourgeoisie who had dared to cross momentarily back over their tentative territorial and social boundaries. This of course is not recommended for the feeble or the fainthearted; because, until the revolution comes, or the proletariat triumphs, there will be difficulties and perils in chance encounters of the social classes. So I must hasten to explain that a security conscious Dr. M was operating within a safety net of collaborators competent in the martial arts; like Geoffrey Grier, who has been an international martial arts competitor and is a son of a black psychiatrist, Dr. William Grier, coauthor with Dr. Price Cobb of the late 1960s blockbuster, Black Rage.
At the moment when the oppressed have had enough, their rage will explode -- Fanon had warned us in The Wretched of the Earth -- and it is at that moment, at the very point of mental and spiritual coagulation and defeat, when they will come together and rise. Frantz Fanon went on to tell of a category of reconstruction groups called “’djemaas’ (village assemblies) of northern Africa or in the meetings of western Africa, tradition demands that the quarrels which occur in a village should be settled in public. It is communal self-criticism, of course, and with a note of humor, because everybody is relaxed, and because in the last resort we all want the same things. But the more the intellectual imbibes the atmosphere of the people, the more completely he abandons the habits of calculation, of unwonted silence, of mental reservations, and shakes the spirit of concealment. And it is true that already at that level we can say that it spreads its own light and its own reason.”
However, psychiatric authority for a self-help peer group focus on individual feelings (or addiction) in relation to white supremacy became available anew in the late 1960s, when Jeffrey Grier’s father, Dr. William H. Grier, and his collaborator, Dr. Price M. Cobbs, published Black Rage. Dr. Grier has also consulted with Dr. M and his Recovery Theatre around the time of the pilot trial run of the first “Black Reconstruction Groups.” According to Grier and Cobbs, in the “Introduction to the Paperback Edition” of Black Rage, “The most important aspect of therapy with blacks, we are convinced, is that racist mistreatment must be echoed and underlined as a fact, an unfortunate fact, but a most important fact – a part of reality. Dissatisfaction with such mistreatment is to be expected, and one’s resentment should be of appropriate dimensions” among black warriors who would exact retribution. “Psychiatry for such warriors,” Grier and Cobbs went on to explain, should aim to “keep them fit for the duty at hand and healthy enough to enjoy the victories” that are likely to emerge.
Fitness for duty is a pleasant but likely side effect of Dr. M’s “Black Reconstruction Groups” working to free the minds of persons addicted to white supremacy. This no doubt is no doubt why they do not limit themselves in their group sessions to expressions of resentment of racist mistreatment and dissatisfaction but also calmly allow its hidden effects, which often remain unconscious in the way in which the relentless karate chops of white supremacy have killed our dreams on a daily basis and shattered our ability to love, to feel loved, to love ourselves and therefore one another. I listened with much satisfaction as Dr. M and his assemblies delved into the depths of fractured feelings and emotions of the brokenhearted in order to help them come to terms with betrayal, jealousy and rage, in their moving endeavors to learn to love again.
And so it is that you will find many a reference to love in How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy. This includes, for instance, “Women Who Love” and the motivations of the men who love them.
Dr. M’s own fitness for duty is complex, unique and variegated. According to James W. Sweeney, "Marvin walked through the muck and mire of hell and came out clean as white fish and black as coal." Marvin can boast of “a Ph.D. in Negrology,” as he puts it,” the study of nigguhs” issued by the University of Hardknocks’s College of Hell), based on twelve years of research , independent study , and practicum in San Francisco's Tenderloin and other unlettered social laboratories throughout the United States. There may still be hope, if it pleases you, for Dr. M to join the white man’s system of miseducation and mental health care, when we consider that psychologists, including one of my mentors, the late Dr. Carlton Goodlett, at first were “grandfathered” in when the licensure of psychologists was started in the state of California. Later came the oral exam (conversational, not dental), followed in time by an essay exam, before the boom in “standardized “ multiple choice tests for which workshops were offered to prepare you for a fee, causing excellent practitioners, especially black ones, to be blocked from licensure until they found out and forked over whopping workshop fees .
There is also a burgeoning market opening up in “clinical sociology” and “sociological practice” still cutting out its slice of the marketplace and finding its way in matters of licensure and credentialing in the field of sociology. But here it may be important to say that the self-help peer group does not require a sociological or a mental health professional, any more than the primordial AA groups from which the mental health profession has profited and learned. Dr. M is a social “doctor” (which etymologically means “teacher”) grappling with a social problem, white supremacy and its punishing residue in the minds of oppressed black individuals and white oppressors who have chosen to reject and come to places where their fathers lied. Oppressors pure and simple, who accept white supremacy, must be dealt with in a later context, as you will not very well be able to keep them in a Black Reconstruction or White Supremacy Destruction Group (or White Supremacy Deconstruction, if you will).
Much in the manner of Hegel in his essay on “Master and Slave,” Marvin senses that the oppressor distorts his own mind as well as the mind of the oppressed. Hence Type I and Type II White Supremacy Addiction. White sociologists and the late black psychologist, Bobby Wright, converged in their findings of pathological personality traits (“the authoritarian personality” and “the racial psychopathic personality,” as Bobby put it). But if Hegel was correct in his notion that the oppressor cannot free the slave, that the slave must force the oppressor’s hand, then it is Type II White Supremacy Addiction which if not more resistant to cure, must occupy our primary focus. Type II White Supremacy may be seen as a kind of “niggeritis” or “Negrofication” growing out of an over-identification with the master, who is white. As in any disorder severity of symptoms may vary from mild to moderate or severe. As Frantz Fanon put it when he spoke for the brother with jungle fever in Black Skin, White Mask: “I wish to be regarded as white. If I can be loved by the white woman who is loved by the white man, then I am white like the white man; I am a full human being.” In the twisted mental convolution of a brother in black skin behind a white mask, Fanon observed a “Negro dependency complex” independently chronicled in my own Black Anglo Saxons (black individuals with white minds in black bodies). They struggle to look, think, talk and walk white by day, then go to sleep at night and dream that they will wake up white. They refuse to realize that no matter what they may ever do they will never get out of the black race alive.
On the other hand, you are going to be seeing “nouveau blacks” and lesser Afrocentrics -- who faithfully and unquestionably follow twelve-month years and endeavor even to blackenize the twelve disciples of Jesus Christ -- jumping up to question Dr. M’s re-africanization of the “Twelve Steps” model for “using the Eurocentric twelve steps,” but they forget that the very effort to be practical and collective is the original African way. In any event, we must build on whites as whites have built on us, taking the best of the West and leaving the rest alone. But Dr. M has expressly and creatively added a thirteenth step; for his goal is not just recovery but discovery, his goal is not just to change the individual but to change the individual to get ready to change the world.
Meanwhile there is one thing on which we can all agree: in any serious attempt to solve the bitter mental ravages of white supremacy, we must face the unadulterated fact that we are limited when we look to the institutionalized “profession” and their professional “providers.” This of course is not to say that the institutionalized professionals cannot be helpful. Dr. M is quick to point out that a self-help peer group cannot cure all the diverse neuroses and psychoses that afflict us. Indeed he goes so far as to suggest that some of us “may need to be committed.”
The late Queen Mother Moore (who loved to boast that she had “gone as far as the fourth grade, and stayed in school too long to learn anything”) delighted in going around deconstructing our “slave mentalities” and saying somebody needs to “do some surgery on these Negro minds” – in which Queen Mother had diagnosed a chronic condition she called “oppression psychoneurosis.” Queen Mother Moore was basically joking, that is, laughing to keep from crying, but it is no joke that mental health professionals, operating under the medical model, think nothing of seeing a person suffering from a psychosocial problem and not only treating the victim instead of the problem but – much in the manner of any addict or drug pusher– use or apply chemicals and sometimes chemical abuse to deal with the inability of the “patient” to feel good in a bad place and thrive, to try to “have heart” in a heartless world. Many people are unaware to this very day that the practice once was rampant for psychiatrists to treat a person with chronic mental maladies by subjecting them to lobotomies cutting off a portion of their brains. Shock treatment was another method – you’re shocked by life, let’s shock your brain, Senator Eagleton (who later ran for the vice-presidency in the 1970s on the ticket with George McGovern).
It should never have been any surprise that the mental health profession would be of only partial help in reconstructing the psychic consequences of centuries of prolonged brainwashing and subjugation (this is not to mention “Sicko” and what we know of the crippling new effects of “managed care” on the medical profession). Many mental health experts, the overwhelming majority of them white, have long suggested that the “medical model” may be inappropriate in the treatment of the psychological, not to mention, sociological components of mental illness.
But you don’t have to be a mental health professional or a sociologist to know that we can no longer restrict our search for healing to professional shrinks, raring back in executive chairs and carpeted suites stocked with “psychometric instruments” standardized on the white middle class, far removed from the realities of the concrete social milieu of afflicted and homeless black “subjects” living lives of hardship and subjugation, with no assurance of available treatment.
Even when they are “insured they are limited to the care and treatment some insurance clerk is willing to “authorize.” In matters of mental health, this typically will include a few sessions of “fifty minute hours” of “talk therapy” before leaving with a prescription or chemical palliative to dull agony and the pain but not the punishment of life on the skids in a sick society.
The hour is up and time is running out, black people, but white supremacy is not. We are living now in the final and highest stage of racism and white supremacy. We’ve let our struggle slip back while sitting in classrooms and conferences crooning about “afrocentricity” and ancient African glories that have gone forever.
We have come now to a crossroads. We have lost control of our children’s minds, our future. We have lost their respect, and appear to be on a collision course to a war of words between the black generations, in which hip-hop youth disparage and mock our language, our music and our humanity with a creativity and a rime and a rhythm we can’t fathom, let alone equal in our pitifully fruitless endeavors to eliminate the “n-word” and box with the black-on-black random violence of dissocialized youth who have concluded that adults and their leaders cannot or will not fight the power. Who knows but it may be that Dr. M’s movement of recovery from addiction to and from white supremacy is offering us a final and effective chance to begin to “sit down together,” to get together and get our heads together.
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From the Archives: A Retreat to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy
Beyond Black Rage/White Supremacy
Anger and rage are the dominant emotions expressed at the Pan African Mental Health Peer Group sessions to recover from the addiction to white supremacy. The initial emotion is joy due to the relief and excitement of persons finding themselves in a safe space to express themselves, finally and freely. The consensus in such a space has been long overdue and why has it taken so long to figure out the solution to an unbearable situation of stultification.
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What a relief to be in a space where persons can speak and be heard, accepted and not rejected or told they are too angry or too emotional. Poetically speaking, it is as though they have been standing in the rain but finally someone has arrived with an umbrella.
As each addict to white supremacy does his/her check-in, anger is clearly the dominant emotion, with women expressing the most severe degree of outrage, the men maintain their well known cool pose until they go deeper into their testimony, then we see their rage equals if not surpasses that of the women. There are those of both genders who want to do acts of violence to white society. They are pissed at the hostile environment on the job and want to attack their boss or co-workers. Again, they are overjoyed to be in a space where their anger can be expressed without recrimination.
There are those upset at the recent arrival of white people in the hood. They don’t understand why the white people are there, how they got there, and why nothing can be done to get them out, such as burning down their houses or even burning crosses on their lawns, such is the severity of the rage—totally irrational, making those addicted a danger to themselves and others.
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Some of the blacks addicted to white supremacy are angry at other blacks. They cannot understand the negative behavior of blacks, why they are killing each other nightly, why youth are out of control, or why the police harass them for simply being black.
Of course violence is the ultimate result of anger and rage, and there are quite a few men and women forced into court mandated anger management classes. Homicide and suicide are clearly on the rise, especially as we slip into the worldwide recession/depression, for tension is heightened, frustration is deep because many persons cannot decipher a solution to their economic woes. Misplaced aggression is the order of the day because the cause is never attacked such as blood sucking oil companies, scheming and scamming mortgage companies who graciously gave sub-prime loans only to foreclose, and the perennial wage slave bosses. More often the object of rage is the wife, another brother or sister in the hood who is just as frustrated as the victimizer.
Obama’s run for president has given hope to some in the hood, but many can see how racism is tearing him down at every turn, even his wife has been attacked for saying she only of late is she proud of being an American, as if we owe America the Nobel Peace prize for oppressing us through the centuries down to the present moment.
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Even his pastor is ridiculed for having black consciousness and teaching liberation theology—so what if some of his sermons crossed the line of propriety, according to white American standards. If Obama is harmed, look for the ghettoes of America to explode from anger and rage.
The Retreat to Recover
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At a retreat to recover from the addiction to white supremacy, peer group members expressed joy at escaping the city to the country, finding themselves in nature, seeing pine trees standing tall, upright, the sound of water flowing in the creek, the beautiful rolling hills, cows grazing in the distance, lizards running about—bowing up and down as if in salat (prayer), the mighty hawk gliding above our heads, deer and wild turkey outside the window, stars in the night sky, a phenomena never seen in the smog filled city.
After observing the wonder of God, a peer group member said she was beginning to finally understand there was no need to be angry at white people, she now felt the urgent need to recover her mental balance so she could follow her bliss, not spend time in anger and rage due to her hostile environment and the resulting addiction to white supremacy, the cause of much stress, disease and death.
Overpowered by the beauty of nature, she saw the need to focus on her destiny as a divine being in harmony with the beauty in her midst. She said a light had come on in her head so that she see clearly now the infinite possibilities of life.
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The retreat began with the ritual entering the gate of the land, stopping at the creek for a moment of silence to ponder the sound of water, acknowledge the ancestors, to say a prayer asking permission to be on the land:
The group walked up the hill to the meeting house where a meal awaited them: baked salmon, baked chicken, brown rice, bean vegetable soup and potato salad, carrot juice, sweet water from the well.
Grace: We acknowledge the Creator and thank Him for the breath of life, thank Him for the beauty of life, thank Him for the intelligence and wisdom we are blessed with, thank Him that we have the consciousness to desire unity with our brothers and sisters in America, Africa and the Diaspora, thank Him that in spite of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism, we yet have African and spiritual consciousness and are determined to make the cultural revolution a success; thank Him for keeping us on the straight path to national liberation and Pan African liberation . . . (from Step 11, p. 92).
After the meal, the group unpacked and began a session of biblo-therapy, a discussion of the 13 Steps to recover from the addiction to white supremacy.
Step 1
We admit we are not powerless over self hatred, racism and white supremacy thinking, but our lives have become unmanageable, partly because we live in denial and fear.
Denial is quite simply the evasion of reality. Denial can be personal or communal, for sometimes an entire nation can be in denial about its abominations, for they are too painful to make adjustments in the collective psyche and the personal reality, to do so would incriminate the mythology and ritual of said society, thus the normal daily round would be disrupted and dysfunctional, for painful adjustments would be in order, and as long as we can avoid the painful the better, after all, the status quo can be maintained. . . .
But in our grand denial, blacks as well as whites will attempt to convince the world this point of view is left wing poppycock, the thoughts of a disgruntled segment of black Americans who have failed to enjoy the benefits of capitalism, now globalism--no matter the disparities in birth and death, education, wage parity, housing, health care, homicide and suicide--in every aspect of Americana.
(from "Race: The Grand Denial," unpublished essay by Dr. M)
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Fear is the residue of slavery, the torture, rape, murder, the mores of submission and passivity whipped into our ancestors and elders and transmitted through DNA to the present generation who live in fear of white authority, especially the police who are the modern day slave catchers. But fear remains as the single most element that prolongs white supremacy. We fear each other, we fear success, we fear to do for self or to attempt self sufficiency on the economic level—for how shall we live without a paycheck from the white man, how shall we make it? We fear associating with a black radical brother or sister, after all, the white man is watching us always, he has spies tracking our every move, we are certain of it. . . . We fear the woman and man we love, for surely they will betray us, it is only a matter of time, they are going to cross us, so we cannot trust them ever, no matter how much they say they love us and no matter how much we love them. We cannot unite with the brotherhood or sisterhood because we fear something is surely to go wrong, money will be stolen, our wife or girlfriend will run off with another brother.
(from How to Recover, Step 1, page 30)
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With respect to fear, the group was asked to do an exercise to dispel fear of each other. They were told to give each other a massage as they sat at the conference table. The purpose was to help them get to know each other. This exercise was said to be one of the highlights of the retreat. It relaxed everyone, making them feel safe.
Step 2
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We have come to believe that a power within ourselves—for we are within God and God is within us—can restore us to sanity, freedom, self-determination, independence and nationhood as a Pan African people, as spiritually conscious human beings.
Nothing and no one can help us until we are ready to help ourselves. Even God tells us we must take the first step, then He will take ten. . . . We must call upon that power within to restore us to sanity, to cast away our fears, the inferiority complex we have allowed to master our soul as a result of believing the white supremacy hype. We must call upon the power within and the Higher Power without, call it God, Allah, Jesus, Jah, whatever, whomever, just know we must tune into the source of spiritual power to overcome our addiction to white supremacy that has us disunited, hateful, selfish, greedy, with hearts full of evil and murder. In such a state of mind, how can we be successful in life, certainly we are in no condition to love or to be loved. We are a wretched wretch and of no good to ourselves or anyone else. In such a mental state, we cannot think of freedom, justice, self-determination, independence. . . . So we call upon the Higher Power to heal our sick minds and hearts. . . .
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Step 3
We have made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand it: that God is a power within ourselves. Yes is the message to ourselves, yes, the magic word. . . .
Find a place to be silent, silent as the trees, as the wind, as the rolling hills. Meditate on the purpose of this retreat, on the purpose of your life.
The language is silence. It speaks louder than words. Sometimes it is better to say nothing, let life reveal itself. . . . Sometimes the mouth cannot keep quiet. It must chatter out of fear not being heard. Yet one is heard in the silence. It is when one talks that one is not heard. The eyes speak, the heart, the hands, the feet speak. Hear the feet running in fear. Hear the feet running in love. Hear the arms moving in hate. You do not talk to me, yet I hear everything you say. No, no, no, that is all you say. Everything about you is no. Your lips say no, your eyes, your heart, your mind, your arms, legs, feet. You are a no person. I run from you. You say no to God. . . . When you say yes to life you open the world of infinite possibilities. Yes to love. Yes to success, yes to hope, yes to truth, yes to prosperity, yes to divinity, yes to resurrection, yes to ascension, yes to eternity…. Yes is the language of God. Yes is the language of Divinity, Spirituality.
All the prophets said yes. Adam said yes. Abraham said yes. Moses said yes. Solomon said yes. Job said yes. Jeremiah, Isaiah said yes . . . Jesus said yes, Muhammad . . . Elijah and Malcolm, Martin, Garvey, Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth said yes. Fannie Lou and Rosa Parks, Betty Shabazz and Coretta Scott said yes. Mama and daddy said yes, grandma and grandpa said yes. All the ancestors said yes. Forevermore, let go of no and say yes. Dance to yes. Shout to yes. . . .
(from Beyond Religion, Toward Spirituality, Dr. M)
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All negativity in the family must cease immediately because it is not of the Most High and cannot be redeemed in the temple of holiness. Fly into the winds Pan Africa, fly into the winds of the Most High and be as one with the wind, yes, even that whirlwind Garvey told you about that was sure to come and has come, let us rejoice. Say again, we are within the Higher Power and the Higher Power is within us. Say again, the tide is turning because we are turning the tide. Ache, Amen, Amin, Hotep.
Step 4
We shall make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves . . .
We can never stand tall until we face all the truth about ourselves, as Sun Ra taught, the low down dirty truth, that is what we want to examine, for the plain truth is not good enough, rather, we want to low down funky truth. Cornel West says everybody wants to hide the funk, tame the funk, disguise the funk, but we are only enabled and empowered when the funk comes through. . . .
A sister volunteered to clean the funk in the house. She said this would be her contribution to the retreat. So she began to clean the dust, the spider webs, the grime, the clutter. Others joined her, but she took the lead. Amina Baraka said, “The only way you can clean the funk is to get down and clean the funk!”
We cannot be healed until we clean the funk in our lives, the baggage, the waste, the clutter that prevents us from thinking clearly, from hearing the voice of God when He speaks to us. Why are you still praying when God has already answered? You are blocking the message to your mind—you are blocking your blessings with your filth, yet you want to be in heaven. For too long my patron has begged me to clean up so God can bless me in a big way! So I thank the sisters who came like angels to help me clean up my act. Surely God will not bless us until we stop acting ungratefully, until we take a complete inventory of ourselves and make corrections to qualify for our blessings.
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After reading and discussing several more steps, the facilitator asked the group to apply white paint on their faces and walk to the pond, a short distance into the woods. One person resisted taking the walk but finally submitted, and once at the pond was overjoyed she had decided to come. The walk to the woods and arriving at the pond full of clear water from the mountain transformed her spirit and the spirit of all present. One person wanted to shout so she did. On the other side of the pond cows were grazing. The bull roared as if to reply to her shout. Turtles stuck their heads out of the water. One person conversed with them. The turtles lingered, then disappeared only to reappear.
Upon returning from the pond, the group continued reading the steps. Step 5 caused persons to break down. This step involves admitting to God and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. When the facilitator read the text about apologizing for being a dope dealer, a sister confessed that she too had been a dope dealer and apologized to those persons whose lives she destroyed.
She began to cry and had to be comforted.
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When the facilitator read from the text the apology to black teachers and professors, another person testified she had been mean and cruel to her college professors and apologized. She too began to cry and had to be comforted.
The retreat ended with the ritual washing of the white paint off the faces. During the retreat, the facilitator received a call from poet Amiri Baraka, and when he was asked to give a message to the group, said simply, “White off!” And so it is.
But the retreat revealed a problem deeper than the addiction to white supremacy, for after all, white supremacy is an illusion for no one is superior to another, thus the old folks said white people suffer lunacy and should be left alone, as one does the crazy uncle in the family. The Holy Qur’an says, “Leave them alone in their inordinacy blindly wandering on. . . . ”
The real problem for Pan Africans is to ascend from the animal plane to our divine self, to be in this world but not of it, to strive to express our greatness, to defy the hostile environment by not giving energy to it—expel the anger and rage with love, but be always on the alert and wear the armor of God, only then can we walk untouched through the valley of the shadow of death, only then can we sit in the presence of our enemies, yet our cup shall overflow with goodness and mercy, and we shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Ache.
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If you or your group would like to attend a retreat to recover from the addiction to white supremacy, call Dr. M at 510-200-4164. Email: jmarvinx@yahoo.com. Order his book HOW TO RECOVER FROM THE ADDICTION TO WHITE SUPREMACY, foreword by Dr. Nathan Hare, afterword by Ptah Allah El, Black Bird Press, 1222 Dwight Way, Berkeley CA, $19.95.
How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy: Step 1
Step 1
We admit we are not powerless over self hatred, racism and white supremacy thinking, but our lives have become unmanageable, partly because we live in denial and fear. Fear is the residue of slavery, the torture, rape, murder, the mores of submission and passivity whipped into our ancestors and elders and transmitted through DNA to the present generation who live in fear of white authority, especially the police who are the modern day slave catchers. But fear remains as the single most element that prolongs white supremacy. We fear each other, we fear success, we fear to do for self or to attempt self sufficiency on the economic level—for how shall we live without a paycheck from the white man, how shall we make it?
We fear associating with a black radical brother or sister, after all, the white man is watching us always, he has spies tracking our every move, we are certain of it, thus we cannot go to a black business, a conscious happening for fear of being reported. We fear the woman and man we love, for surely they will betray us, it is only a matter of time, they are going to cross us, so we cannot trust them ever, no matter how much they say they love us and no matter how much we love them. We cannot unite with the brotherhood because we fear something is surely to go wrong, money will be stolen, our wife or girlfriend will run off with another brother. Thus the drama of fear is constant. Each time we leave the house we fear not making it back home alive, for we live in a war zone and if the police don’t catch us riding dirty, another brother will try to take us out for some ignorant reason, something petty, maybe a twenty dollar dope or gambling debt. We must detox and recover from fear. The only thing to fear is fear itself. Release the fear because it has made our lives unmanageable.
If truth be told, we are not powerless over anything, but have the power within ourselves to overcome any force in the universe that is not in harmony with the Higher Power without and within ourselves. We are only powerless when we deny who we are and do not recognize we exist in harmony with the universal spirit of peace, justice and mercy. White supremacy is an illusion in the minds of those who believe it and those who accept the scam. Nothing has power over you except when you allow it to have such power. Thus, we should not blame the president, congress, corporations or any other institutions because it is we who allow them to carry on business, and if we did not give them the power they would disappear overnight like a bad dream, but we support white supremacy by supporting its institutions, working its jobs, buying its goods, attending its houses of worship, then get angry because we feel useless, helpless, depressed, confused, etc. Yet we have allowed ourselves to be deceived, used and abused, for we have given power to those who despitefully use and abuse us. What can the wicked husband do to the good wife that she doesn’t allow him to do? She has the power to separate and divorce him. She has the power to flee in the night. Should we then blame the wicked husband or blame her for allowing wickedness to consume her life? Thus, the problem with you is not white supremacy, the problem with you is you! You continue buying a bogus bag of goods and then when you get home you wonder why the food in the bag is no good, rotten fruit fit for the garbage can.
So yes, we need to admit our lives are unmanageable, but only because we refuse to exercise the God given power to manage ourselves, but allow other forces to take over our existence: we become slaves to racism because of our refusal to stand up and face it toe to toe. We have forgotten the faith of our ancestors who were determined to be free by any means necessary. We accept injustice on the job, at the church, in the home because we are cowardly beings not worthy of the name human and certainly not of the name divine, though that is our essence, divinity. After all the blood we shed in Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas, why are we yet today victims of white supremacy exploitation, pimped downtown and uptown by blood sucking merchants who refuse to employ us, yet we are the reason for their existence. If we boycotted them one week they would be out of business, yet we want to blame them for exploiting us, no, blame ourselves, and thank them for teaching us a valuable lesson: don’t allow ourselves to be pimped, yes, refuse to be nappy headed hos. Refusing to be called a ho is one matter, but to act like a nappy headed ho is quite another. Don’t say you are against white supremacy when you buy the goods of white supremacy. No matter how high gas prices get, you have no intention to protest, but you will kill your brother if he jumps in front of you in the gas station line, yet you won’t protest or boycott Shell, Exxon, and Mobile when they report their multi billion dollar quarterly earnings. So you are either ignorant or simply in denial that you support white supremacy, just as you are constantly reacting to white supremacy police when they kill a brother in the hood, but while brothers are killing each other nightly in the hood with guns and bullets bought from white supremacy gun sellers, you don’t protest. You refuse to organize peace patrols in your community, but are satisfied to attend funeral after funeral of neighborhood children, even your own sons and daughters. Come out of your slumber, come out of your sloth, you can and must manage your existence, you can and must erase white supremacy thinking from your heart and mind. Go somewhere and sit down to think seriously how you can configure a beautiful life for yourself and your family. Think about resisting the devil so he will flee from you. Think about putting on the armor of God or your Higher Power under whatever name.
from How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy by Dr. M, aka Marvin X, Black Bird
Press, Berkeley, 2007.
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